Yet Joe’s eyes were unseeing.  Children played on the street, people walked and talked, the toilers were busy at their tasks, and that was all he knew or saw.  And yet of late he had a new, unexpected vista of life.  Like many men, Joe had missed women.  There was his mother, but no one else.  He was rather shy, and he was too busy.  But during the last few months a teacher—­Myra Craig—­had been coming to the printery to have some work done for the school.  She had strangely affected Joe—­sprung an electricity on him that troubled him profoundly.  He could not forget her, nor wipe her image from his brain, nor rid his ears of the echoes of her voice.  He went about feeling that possibly he had underrated poetry and music.  Romance, led by Myra’s hand, had entered the dusty printery and Joe began to feel like a youngster who had been blind to life.

Outside the world was blowing away on the gray wings of the twilight, blowing away with eddies of dust that swept the sparkling street-lamps, and the air was sharp with a tang of homesickness and autumn.  The afternoon was quietly waning, up—­stairs the hat-makers, and here the printers, were toiling in a crowded, satisfying present, and Joe stood there musing, a tall, gaunt man, the upstart tufts of his tousled hair glistening in the light overhead.  His face was the homeliest that ever happened.  The mouth was big and big-lipped, the eyes large, dark, melancholy and slightly sunken, and the mask was a network of wrinkles.  His hands were large, mobile, and homely.  But about him was an air of character and thought, of kindliness and camaraderie, of very human nature.  He stood there wishing that Myra would come.  The day seemed to demand it; the wild autumn cried out for men to seek the warmth and forgetful glory of love.

He could get some nice house and make a home for her; he could take her out of the grind and deadliness of school-work and make her happy; there would be little children in that house.  He thought she loved him; yes, he was quite sure.  Then what hindrance?  There, at quarter to five that strange afternoon, Joe felt that he had reached the heights of success, and he saw no obstacle to long years of solid advance.  He had before his eyes the evidence of his wealth—­the great, flapping presses, the bending, moving men.  If anything was sure and solid in this world, these things were.

He felt sure Myra would come.  She had not been around for a week, and, anticipating a new meeting with her, he felt very young, like a very young man for the first time aware of the strange loveliness of night, its haunting and hidden beauties, its women calling from afar.  It all seemed wild and impossible romance.  It smote his heart-strings and set them trembling with music.  He wondered why he had been so stupid all these years and evaded life, evaded joys that should have been his twenty years earlier.  Now it seemed to him that his youth had passed from him defeated of its splendor.